School district officials investigate a bevy of brawls that broke out at a Texas all-girls academy this week, discovered because the cellphone shot videos of them were prominently posted on social media as part of a happening called “Beat Week.”
Administrators in the Dallas area Grand Prairie Independent School District know of at least three of these Instagram posted videos which allegedly show some of their female students violently pulling hair, punching, and dragging unsuspecting victims to the ground, according to the Dallas Fox affiliate KDFW 4.
This abhorrent behavior purportedly came from middle school aged students, mainly seventh graders, enrolled at the Young Women’s Leadership Academy (YWLA) at Arnold Middle School, a girls-only “dynamic learning experience” with a write-up that reads like finishing school. The website touts building future female leaders through core values that include character building and teamwork, also nurturing “the intellectual and social development necessary for success in college, career and life.”
However, at least six of YWLA’s young ladies got mixed up in the melees. In a statement, Grand Prairie ISD spokesman Sam Buchmeyer said about “Beat Week” that the school “immediately intervened and worked with campus administrators to identify these students. Several students have been removed from the campus and will face disciplinary action.”
The KDFW 4 report stated that school officials placed the offending students in an alternative school and the severity of the resulting discipline will depend on the degree each student was involved in the making of these fight videos. Interestingly, the Grand Prairie ISD Student Code of Conduct handbook, based on Chapter 37 of the Texas Education Code, addresses fighting and even, congregating to watch a fight on campus as actions subject to disciplinary consequences.
The school spokesman added that the district’s swift action in handling the purported misconduct of the six female students appearing in beating videos displayed that the district would not tolerate this kind of behavior.
Grand Prairie ISD and YWLA parent Nicole Hinojosa told KDFW 4: “I’m just shocked and appalled.” Her daughter attends the school. She described the behavior of the girls in the videos as “basically acting like animals.”
Last year, Breitbart Texas reported on several impromptu girl-on-girl beat downs, all captured on cellphone and posted onto social media. One, in a Houston ISD high school, showed a three teen tussle where one of the girls landed in jail. A four female fracas happened in a high school hallway at another Houston area school district, Cypress-Fairbanks ISD. This social media posted video showed a free-for-all complete with dramatic hair pulling, clothes grabbing, head banging, shoving, wrestling, and bashing. One student claimed the fighting started with name calling over social media.
Even before social media became the go-to place for students to post their schoolhouse scuffles, Newsweek looked at a surge of violent behavior among girls. In 2005, they called the girl-on-girl mano-a-mano behavior a “burgeoning national crisis.” Three years later, a report by the U.S. Department of Justice noted that the number of girls charged with assault jumped 24 percent between 1996 and 2005, while assault charges against boys dropped. The DOJ also suggested girls are more likely to attack their same-sex peers.
In February, officials from the Abington School District in Pennsylvania blamed social media for its similar sounding slug-fest called “fight week.” One of the videos posted online showed two girls gratuitously fighting while campus officials, including a school resource official, tried to break up the altercation.
Follow Merrill Hope on Twitter @OutOfTheBoxMom.